A Picture in watercolour by Tennyson.

The fire had come and gone.
The gold sparkled, among the serene greens and pinks and forgotten yellows of the countryside.
Waterlilies glistened pale, white and yellow and forgetful, on the banks.
The willows bent right over and wept their long, slow tears into their rippling selves below.
Their long, gentle drooping branches formed an arch beneath whish she walked to the shore.
There, gently bobbing on stray ripples in the fold of a willow-root, was a little gray boat.
It gleamed faintly, she stepped in, and then it made a foray into mid-current.
She looked up, for a second, looking quietly around, like a blind man who does realise he is blind.
She lay down, her motion barely disturbing the boat, which drifted, as in a dream, slowly downstream.
And then she sang.
A haunting tune, a simple tune, continuous somehow with the autumn and the dusk.
The pale, fading evening was her song, that fades into night without a break.
It sounded in the ears of the methodical reapers, and it seemed to them to go on, even after night had fallen upon them, and the sound had gone from the fields and the sky.
The boat floated on, the deep grey currents and eddies carried it on.
The gray houses rose out of the imminent darkness.
The song was in the air, and in the water, and in her white face and streaming hair.
The paleness of her cheek was silence.
Dark grey shapes of men gathered by the riverside to watch her pass.
The murmured darkly and their hands formed crosses in the half-light.
She did not hear.
It seemed, as she passed, the dancing candles were snuffed out.
The city, poised in celebration, took up her silence.
Grey mist entered the air, and the faces, and the thoughts, of all but one.
He looked with thoughtful face upon the lost beauty drifting past.
He whispered a blessing;
A cloud was over the sun.

Moon tonight.

The clouds were all round the moon tonight.
They spiralled around her, pale in reflected glow, and formed a tunnel to the moon.
And I felt that if I just kept walking, the pull of that soft white glow would lift me up, past the garden wall and the maroo house opposite, past the far-away palm tree and etceteras, right into that tunnel. And I'd get to discover it all.
But I was too scared. I didn't walk, for fear I'd hit the wall. For fear, the tunnel would give way beneath my feet, and I'd fall, with the etceteras and maroo house watching, down to the hard reality of the pavement and tarred roads. They've even lopped off the branches of the neighbours' spreading tree, so there'll be nothing to catch me.
Who ? Those corporation fellows, of course. The ones officious enough to chop off the branches, but awful enough to leave them in the street. And I showed what I thought of them, righrt out there on my face. Everyone else nearly died of mortification.
So, I just looked, then lowered my eyes and locked the garden gate. The grilles barred it all right out of reach. I felt awful. And the lady serene in the sky looked at me with her wise eyes, and she smiled, and then it hurt all the more that I couldn't face the garden wall. I couldn't. I can't yet. And she's already forgiven me all of it, that's the worst. It's like she knows all the crime I'm going to commit. And I've hung my head.

Tired.

I'm tired now.
Not anything else, not angry or depressed or impatient.
Just tired.
My body doesn't cry out for rest,
But it's a deep heaviness in every bone and muscle.
My mind is not throwing in the towel temporarily,
And deserting me for sleep,
But it processes things slowly,
Taking the longest time over the thought of its own tiredness.
A long, light, greyish feeling is spread all over my brain.
Like old cotton padding, slowing everything down.
All the feelings of the day have gone.
That part of me is empty, but it doesn't feel like a gaping hole.
I just feel lighter.
I've left even the day behind.
A long slow weariness.
An enfolding by rest and the comfortable position.
Yawn.
There I go.

The Wind

She rose early. Very early, when the first streaks of light were coming into the sky. The sight was magical across the expanse of sky and plain that she called home. She stood in the middle of an open place, and felt faint dawn breezes playing with her hair, and making her want to dance. She did, and so did the pale gold boy far out on the plain, who was laughing at her. And they were both laughing at everyone else. The plain rolled empty away in every direction, and the first streaks of sunlight laughed at the plain and the sky, and the world was full of joy.
She laughed inside all day, the brown boy that stood silently some way away as she worked the fields in the hot sunshine saw it, but noone else did. He smiled, and a cool breeze stole away the cruelty from the air, and some of the colour in her cheek.
The sun did not die magnificently, he slowly faded, a lingering passing, and she watched in mute understanding. The wind pulled her away, the insistent touch on her body called her to follow the path it ran across the sky. She smiled and looked at him- he ran lightly, his body beautiful with joy. She stood still and watched, though the joy she had held within her streamed away to join him on the backdrop of infinite skies, and coloured in all the hues, coincidentally, of the sunset.
That night, the storm tore around the house, she watched the violent movements that assaulted the darkness and made the house the intolerable evil. They did not notice when she left the house, the sounds outside blocked everything out. She saw, walking out onto the plain, the dark man waiting for her silently, like a magnet drawing her into the heart of the storm. His black eyes danced now, the gale blew until her clothes flapped like a pennant on the crest of a hill. The lighting flashed once, threatening to split the sky wide open. It didn't.
The next morning, looking at her, they noticed she had been out into the night. Her appearance was as usual, but she never would come back. The winds had claimed her soul.

Indecision

The world whirled around her
Dizzying heights and disappointing lows
The winds blew her to a place she knew
Perhaps from a dream, or maybe not.
Deja-vu or Presque-vu or something else entirely.
It made no difference.
She watched with a blank face
While her mind rose up and danced away.
She put her foot out,
And stepped up to the height,
Of the expectations,
And then the world she knew settled into simple dimensions
Not whirls and streaks, like Impressionist blurs.
Just lines and outlines, and colour in between,
And she knew she was back
Somewhere she understood.
She tried, she fought
Herself and everything else,
She didn't understand why she had to.
But she did.
And do you know what ?
She won.

It's a happy ending.
Maybe.
For when one part of you wins and another loses,
Can you consider it a victory for yourself ?
She couldn't decide.
Stalemate.
Again.

Stage

A little girl looked at the stage
A big, lighted up place
A lot of people on it
Talking very loudly-
she could hear them all the way over here.
They looked small
No bigger than a little bit of her little finger.
But they seemed very big
And she wondered why.
She wanted to be up there too.

She stood on the big, wide stage
That stretched away on either side
And though she strained her eyes,
She couldn't see the end.
She couldn't turn her face.
She looked at the heads down, near the floor-
A lot of little black heads, with little pale faces,
Whiter in the white lights,
All looking at her.
The black, round microphone.
She went near it
Put her hands behind her back
And started to make all the sounds
She'd practised so long.
When she finished, she looked at them again.
They were smiling now, all the little faces.
She couldn't make out their mouths or eyes
But she knew they were smiling at her.
And she felt a proud glow.
She turned away then,
Walking on and on till she came to the end
That she couldn't see.
And when she came down,
She promised herself she would go back again.
She was big there,
Even when she was little.
It was wonderful there-
A little scary and endless,
But wonderful.
She would go back.

Walk down a street in Delhi
-It depends which street-
And either there's no one for miles
Except for some swanky car swooshing past,
Or every passer, in his hurry, shoves you.
I wonder whether I will have to learn
This push around or leave alone
Philosophy to live here,
Or whether it will come naturally.

There is a restaurant without a back. It had a back, it really did, only it doesn't have one anymore. It's like this- There used to be a back wall to this shop, only that back was part of a larger structure, an old building that got broken down to make a big new building. For some time they left the back wall there out of consideration for the shop, but in the end they had to tear it down. They left the front of the shop and the sides intact, because it was an outside wall, and they never tore down outside walls unless the definition of what was to be inside changed.

The shop was on an old street, with very fixed ideas. This street knew for absolutely certain that a shop, even a flower shop, had to have, in addition to flowers or the respective item of produce, a shop-window, two side walls, a roof, and a back wall. They could even omit the side walls and the window, as for the makeshift establishments with plastic sheets over them that solf food on the footpath, but never the roof and never the back wall. The flower shop had committed an error, a greivous error, that like most greivous errors was practically impossible to put right.

It did try. It thought of putting a plastic sheet across the back, but people remarked it would look like a photo studio, and the flowers as though they were posing for a one- minute passport-size, and so that idea was quashed. Then it thought that if you put a lot of flowers on stools across the back, people wouldn't notice the construction site that much, and so they tried it.

Something about the picture of those flowers against the background of a dust-covered, cement-coloured construction site appealed to the shop, and it left it that way, though everyone still noticed the site. These things are impossible to hide anyway, it thought.

The flowers against such a contrasting background looked either brave, in all their glory of colour, defying everything beyond, or pathetic, with a dust-layer beginning to settle on them at any point of time, only flowers against the idea of the great things that were to come up beyond. Both ideas occurred to the flowershop, and that was the reason why it left itself that way, even though the street looked gently disapproving all the time.

Then one day, someone remarked while buying an assortment bouquet, that it looked like a flower-stall rather than a flower shop if you asked her, which nobody had, but she ventured it anyway. The street was sympathetic and slightly triumphant, looking like as many told-you-so's as it might ever have wished to say.
The shop thought it should feel hurt, for a moment it was, but then the sight of the red roses and yellow chrysanthemums and blue-dyed orchids and pink plastic ribbon in the bouquet made it forget, and chuckle. Then the street shook it's head in disapproval and a bit of disappointment, and things forgot all about it and went on.

A feeling

She was soaring.
Every movement looked like a dance,
But a dance controlled, held down.
If it hadn't been held down,
It would have flown away.
And she with it.
Everything was fast, precise.

The power that flowed through her hands as she worked was
A smooth energy with no source
Coming from nowhere
Ending in her,
Collecting in her body
As a wellspring of light.
She could have believed that she was glowing with it.
It couldn't be hidden.

She flew.
Across rooms,
And the people who saw her walk
Thought there was some unreality about it.
It wasn't walking.
Her feet were pressed to the ground,
They moved through space, as everyone's did,
But this could not be walking.
It meant too much.

The pain in her body was real.
But it failed to touch her-
She was gone, and it fell behind.
It didn't matter.

She couldn't understand it,
But she felt it all through her.
She didn't try to explain it.
But, for that day,
She had courage, strength, and a chance.
And joy that gave her hope.